Ohh god that fold out colour chart! - that thing was a nightmare. Not as bad as the lenslock that came with Elite, but still pretty grisly.
I've always been a big fan of ManicMiner, I played it from day 1, but only completed it with ZX32 (emulator) and it's autosave. The last place I worked, we'd always play games at lunchtime (or when the boss wasn't around) - usually something like Doom or Duke3D, but sometimes we'd take on a speccy classic, try and finish it in an afternoon. If it wasn't for that, probably wouldn never have finished Manic, Skool Daze, Back to Skool, Wizball etc.
I wish Matt Smith would do like Jeff Minter, and start doing iOS or Android games, hell anything at all really - give the guy Game Maker and let him have at it, I think it would be fascinating to see what else his mad imagination can come up with.
Maybe we should hold videogame legends in the same esteem as authors, or movie stars... in that regard, Matt is the 80's nostalgia equivalent of Charles Dickens. One of my favorite developers has to be David Reidy though, wrote Skool Daze and Back to Skool - he actually wrote those in assembly by hand!, in hex, then his wife would type it in. We just don't see that level of hardcore these days.
Health, Ammo, and bacon and eggs!
